Linus Pauling is one of those people who is almost unknown to the general public, but who made some of the greatest contributions in the history of science. The fact that he is the only person in history to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, in different fields (and might have received a third in yet another field was he not at the time hated by both Joe McCarthy and Stalin), should give you some idea of the man’s achievements. In New Scientist’s list of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, only he and Einstein appeared from the 20th century.
Of course, if he’s known now, it’s generally as an uneducated know-nothing quack, thanks to the opinion of the medical field for him. Personally I think that says more about the medical field than about Pauling.
Pauling was a chemist, a field that is not mine, so forgive some unfortunate but necessary oversimplification in the following, but I have known chemists say of him he invented a new science and called it chemistry’. Pauling was one of the very first scientists to apply the results of quantum physics to another field, in his case the nature of chemical bonding (the use of quantum mechanics led to some wonderful results like showing that benzene’s structure is due to it being a superposition of two different states!) Using the results that had been discovered in the previous decade about the internal structure of the atom, he managed to show how chemical bonds are formed, for the first time establishing a secure theoretical basis for predictions that had previously been based on a lot of unrelated rules-of-thumb. In particular, he came up with a concept known as orbital hybridisation’, which explains among other things the peculiar nature of the bonds carbon atoms make, and underpins all organic chemistry to this day.
After this work, which culminated in his classic textbook The Nature Of The Chemical Bond, and was the work for which he received his first Nobel Prize, Pauling started research into biochemistry (although the field didn’t have a name as such at the time). Pauling was always most fascinated by chemistry as it applied to human beings, and he came up with a number of groundbreaking results in the field of protein structure. The most important discovery he made at this time was the way that sickle-cell anaemia works he identified the specific fault in haemoglobin that causes the disease, showed that people who were carriers but not sufferers had both faulty and normal haemoglobin, and suggested the reason for the disease’s prevalence (carriers who aren’t sufferers have improved resistance against malaria). This was the first major work in the field of molecular genetics.
Pauling went on to do much of the foundational work that led to the discovery of the double-helical nature of the DNA molecule. In fact, it’s generally acknowledged that he would almost certainly have been the discoverer of this (which won Crick & Watson the Nobel), were it not for his political activism. Pauling’s passport was taken off him in 1952, because he was a dangerous subversive’, and as a result he couldn’t make a planned visit to the UK, where he would have seen the new X-Ray photographs by Rosalind Franklin that would have allowed him to correct his earlier work. Crick and Watson instead managed to combine Pauling’s earlier work with the new Franklin data and discover the structure of DNA.
It’s ironic that Pauling was hated by McCarthy, and suspected of Communist sympathies, because Stalin also hated him and refused to allow his anti-revolutionary science to be taught. The reason for both men hating him was the same Pauling’s peace activism.
Pauling was, from the early 50s, a fervent campaigner against nuclear weapons and especially against nuclear testing. This was mostly due to his pacifist principles (his former colleague Oppenheimer had offered Pauling the job of head of the chemistry section of the Manhattan Project, but Pauling had refused because he was anti-war), but also on sound scientific principles he believed the dangers of radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests were far worse than was generally believed at the time, and he had the figures to prove it. Pauling’s campaigning work was one of the principle factors which led to the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed by Kennedy and Khrushchev on the same day that Pauling was awarded his second Nobel Prize, this time for Peace.
Most of the rest of Pauling’s life was spent working on the properties of vitamin C and other nutrients, especially as treatments for major diseases. This period of his work is the most controversial some regard it as a blot on his record, while others say that if his work had been properly appreciated it would have saved millions of lives. I’m in the latter camp, for reasons I’ll explain in several posts over the next few months, but one anecdote sums up the medical profession’s absurd reaction to Pauling (this taken from Vitamin C & Cancer by Abram Hoffer with Linus Pauling, in Pauling’s own words):
I was on a television programme with one of the established authorities’ in nutrition, Dr Frederick Stare, then a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. As the interview ended, Dr Stare said “I know that Dr Pauling’s method of preventing the common cold is no good because I tried it, and it didn’t work.” Before I could ask a question, David Frost said “Gentlemen, I’m sorry that our time is up; I thank you for having been on the programme.” Then, after the TV camera had been turned off, Dr Stare turned to me and said “Of course, I didn’t use the astronomical amount that *you* recommend”
With that sort of thing happening, I tend to think of the phrase medical science’ as one of the most absurd oxymorons around but whether you agree with Pauling’s later work or not (and at least do the man the courtesy of reading his work before dismissing it the man was not some uneducated crank, and even in his occasional mistakes he has more genuinely strong ideas than any ten other scientists I can think of), he is one of the most influential people of the last century, and deserves to be more widely-known.
